Friday, June 12, 2009 WASHINGTON: Violent unrest surged to new highs in Afghanistan in May and there are "tough months ahead" even as US reinforcements flow in, the commander of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan warned Thursday. "The past week was the highest level of security incidents in Afghanistan's post-liberation history," General David Petraeus said in a speech here, referring to the Taliban's ouster from power in late 2001. Figures for incidents in Afghanistan for the first week of June were not immediately available.From January to May, insurgent attacks in Afghanistan were up by 59 percent from the same period a year earlier, NATO data show. "There is no question that the situation has deteriorated over the course of the past two years and that there are difficult times ahead," said Petraeus, who heads the US Central Command. "There are some tough months ahead," he added, saying that the levels of violence would rise in part "because we are going to go after their sanctuaries and safe havens as we must."
Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in
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